Tweaks, Tuning and HTML!

But why?

As with all things in life, change is always necessary, and especially when applied with the web. After receiving feedback from a now archived version of this site, there were a few tweaks that I felt necessary for my portfolio to be somewhat successful. Not only that, but I felt that the site needed a much more personal touch!

What needed doing?

The most notable change throughout the site would be the addition of a personal image of me on the homepage as the hole site seemed to be lacking that personal touch. The main reason I did this was to sort of put a face to the work represented throughout as it not only makes me noticeable but also makes me much more relatable, as it puts a human behind what is otherwise just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s.

Another significant change was the removal of the green box on some pages and the decentring of text. This was strictly because the way it was set out previously broke the natural flow of both the site and how people read, making the site appear too ‘blocky’ and the text difficult to read.

As for the smaller things, for accessibility reasons, I decided to add more context to the blog links. This was because in their past state, to a screen reader, they simply read as ‘read more’ three times. For obvious reasons this isn’t good for any circumstances so I decided to add more content to the link so people actually know what they are about to read.

Similarly, to the above, another small thing I implemented was to reword the page titles making them much more meaningful for smaller tabs. For example, on my old pages, every page title started with my name followed by the page title. As such they would simply just display my name which would give the user no indication as to what page they were on.

Recollection, Recollection, Recollection!

Although, being the third site I’ve ever made, this portfolio awarded me with a fairly high mark, I personally want to completely redesign it using newer, better techniques. Recently I have discovered amazing software such as Adobe XD, allowing me to create fast and efficient prototypes, and new programming languages such as SCSS, meaning I no longer have to scroll through hundreds of lines of code to find out what hue of green I had earlier used, that would allow me to make huge improvements in the overall experience of my websites. But maybe that’s just the perfectionist in me. In any case, I wouldn’t expect this site to be looking the same in the near future!